Andrew Tettenborn is a professor of law at Swansea Law School
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Last week Reform UK scandalised Whitehall. If they take power, they said, they would take a hard look at the top civil servants they inherited, and if necessary swap them out for their own external or internal hires. Although this idea is not entirely new (something like it was floated in Reform’s 2024 manifesto and
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The European Union now has its very own honours list, grandly named the European Order of Merit – with gongs dished out to Bono and Angela Merkel. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and Lech Walesa, Poland’s first president after communism, also made the cut in the inaugural honours roll call. ‘With the European Order of
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Yet another immigration and human rights story scandalised the right-leaning press yesterday. Thirty-odd arrivals who came by boat in 2020 have, according to the Home Office, received damages totalling around £200,000. This came after a 2022 decision by the High Court which found their human rights had been infringed when on arrival they had been
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You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic
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Five out of six Palestine Action protesters on trial in relation to a break-in at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton in 2024 were released on bail on Wednesday. The verdicts handed down to them at Woolwich crown court over events at the UK subsidiary of the Israeli defence manufacturer – reported to have caused
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Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem
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Another day, another opinion on what’s wrong with the arts. This week we’ve got a report, ‘Class Ceiling’, by Manchester University Chancellor Nazir Afzal and retired NEU official Avis Gilmore. The paper is billed as ‘A Review of Working Class Participation in the Arts Across Greater Manchester’, and sees the difficulty with the arts as
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Did you read the big news about Reform? No, not its scooping-up of Tory MPs Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell; but rather Nigel Farage’s announcement of a new regime for future defections. Reform may once have jauntily set up what must be a first for any political party, an online defection application form: but the whole
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It is easy to forget that, under a quirk of the UK legal system, if you want to get the law changed it is often not enough simply to get legislation passed. Most Acts of Parliament state that their provisions come into force not immediately, or even on a given date, but when a ministerial
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Another new year, and another controversial human rights victory for a criminal. Fuad Awale was a violent thug and Islamist serving a life sentence for drug-related murder. In 2013, he took a prison officer hostage in an attempt to force the release of Islamic hate preacher Abu Qatada. After this episode he was moved to a
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Roll up for a Christmas surprise on the policing front. According to a leak from the College of Policing to the Telegraph, since confirmed by its chairman and in all likelihood condoned by a government desperate for an upbeat Christmas message, non-crime hate incidents are finally to go. Next month the College and the National
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The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to
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David Lammy clearly spotted that he had set the cat among the pigeons when his plans to cut back on jury trials were leaked last week. Realising how many noses he had put out of joint by proposing to go further even than Sir Brian Leveson’s ideas of last July, in his speech to the
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David Lammy’s plans to prune the right to trial by jury are certainly drastic. Juries would remain only for murder, manslaughter, rape and cases deemed to be in the public interest, with other offences carrying sentences up to five years tried by judge alone. Lawyers are predictably unhappy at these proposals. They see them as
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Shabana Mahmood is a bright minister among a cabinet of duds, dealt a difficult hand and playing it rather well. There was a good deal to like about her speech this afternoon, launching the document describing the government’s plans to deal with refugees and deportation. The idea of reviewing refugee status every 30 months, with a
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The Labour party will, one suspects, curse the name of Epping for some time. The uncomfortable fact is that it stood to lose big-time whatever the result of today’s hearing in the High Court. Following the refusal by Mr Justice Mould to order the owner of the Bell Hotel to cease using it as a
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When a maniac ran amok on a train near Huntingdon on Saturday, train steward Samir Zitouni put his life on the line. Zitouni bravely blocked the attacker from stabbing a girl, leaving him with a gash on his head and neck. The railway worker remains critically unwell in hospital. His family say they are ‘immensely
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Seventy-five years ago today the European Convention on Human Rights was signed in Rome by the 12 states, including Britain, that then formed the Council of Europe. There will be official celebrations: in Strasbourg tonight, a solemn ceremony of speeches and a gala classical concert at the Opéra national du Rhin, and in London next
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When Nigel Farage introduced a bill in the House of Commons requiring the UK to leave the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) this week, it was clear that something has changed in British politics. It wasn’t the absence of deluded heckling from Labour MPs or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, both of which were
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The Met has announced that it will stop investigating non-crime hate incidents, or NCHIs. The pressure on other forces to fall into line may well now be hard to resist (we will have to see). But don’t cheer too loudly yet. The devil is in the detail, and there may be less to rejoice over
